Vehicular Ad hoc Network Paradigm and Evaluation of IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11p using Realistic Vehicular Traces

In recent years, the vehicular communication has become an innovative and sophisticated way to provide necessary information to the rural or urban travellers in roads and motorways. Through the idea of multi-hop ad hoc networking, it is possible to efficiently disseminate traffic related information to the drivers and utilise the information collected from on-board sensors from neighbouring vehicles to provide more safe travel to the passengers. This paper presents an evaluation of two proposed wireless standards for vehicular network communication – IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11p using TCP and UDP data transmission. This paper also investigates various vehicular mobility models and traffic generators for simulations and several well-known routing protocols for inter-vehicular communication. The simulation uses AODV and DSR routing protocols in a realistic vehicular environment using a real-world topological map extracted from TIGER data set. VanetMobiSim is used to generate realistic mobility model and the wireless network is simulated using the dominant network simulator ns-2. From the simulations it is found that IEEE 802.11p performs better than IEEE 802.11a in case of TCP transmission while performs almost similarly in UDP transmission.